By Billy Cox
Herald-Tribune
SARASOTA – Inevitably, when guests visit their home in Tucson, Ariz., for the first time, Gabrielle Giffords will display a macabre twist of humor.
“She’ll go over to the freezer,” her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, told a full house Monday morning at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, “pull out the blue Tupperware, open it up, and show you her head.”
More accurately, it is a large skull fragment removed during gunshot surgery and replaced by a prosthetic device. Giffords, a former U.S. House Democrat, was critically wounded by a diagnosed schizophrenic at a Tucson shopping center in January 2011 as she met with constituents. Nineteen people were shot, six of them fatally, with a 9 mm pistol packing a 33-round magazine.
Following the December slaughter of 20 elementary schoolchildren and six teachers in Newtown, Conn., by a suicidal 20-year-old with three semi-automatic weapons, Kelly and Giffords, who continues to undergo intensive therapy, have become among America’s most public advocates of gun control.
